The final word had barely fallen when the pool erupted, hurling gouts of clotted red and shredded wraiths skyward.
Boom! Fragments of anguished spirits shrieked as they rained down like a grotesque storm. A towering figure, wrapped in rolling black miasma and the stench of slaughtered souls, floated upward from the broken pool and settled in mid-air.
It was Soul Devourer! He stood now, his aura nothing like the broken husk Jared had faced on Level Nine. There was still a threadbare weakness at the core of his soul, yet the tide of demonic essence rolling off him dwarfed Mordain, and every foe Jared had met before.
The laws swirling around his cloak brushed a realm beyond the Heavenly Immortal threshold, hinting at some secret tier above.
Slowly, he lifted his head. Beneath the cowl, two crimson embers burned like twin blood-moons, fixing on Jared without blinking.
“At last, whelp… You have come…”
Gone was the rasp; his words rang clear and icy, each syllable a hammer striking the listeners’ spirits. “I have waited for this day a very, very long time…”
Jared felt that crushing presence and, instead of fear, a wildfire of battle-lust flared behind his eyes.
Chaotic celestial energy thundered through his veins, the lotus of primordial fire in his core turning, petals radiating scalding resolve. Even the Dragonslayer Sword, clasped in his palm, responded with a low, eager hum.
“You’ve recovered quite well. Pity. You’re still going to die,” Jared commented calmly. Soul Devourer threw back his head and roared with laughter, a thunder that shook the plaza tiles.
“Die? You? You’re a mere Level Nine Human Immortal who stumbled into a bit of fortune and now believes himself unbeatable. When I roamed the heavens, devouring stars and their children, your ancestors had not even been born yet. Today, I will teach you what true power is… What despair tastes like…”
Before the echo faded, Soul Devourer snapped his arm upward, clawing at empty air in Jared’s direction.
“Soul-Devouring Claw!”
A black claw, a hundred yards across, condensed from pure soulforce and demonic essence, materialized overhead. Faces of the damned writhed across its surface, breathing decay that could strip life from stone.
The moment it appeared, the space around Jared locked tight. With the force to crush stars, the claw descended.
The strike eclipsed any technique Mordain had ever unleashed. It brushed the doorway to an even higher realm.
Jared’s gaze sharpened. All chaos essence surged to the limit. The Dragonslayer Sword flared, spilling prismatic chaos light across the square.
“Heaven-Splitting Chaos!” With a clear shout, he swung from hip to sky, cutting against the fall.
The resulting sword energy, honed to absolute purity, seemed able to separate the pure from the foul, to cleave the primal chaos itself. It carried Chaotic True Flame and sword intent fierce enough to unmake creation, meeting the claw head-on.
Boom!
Sword and talon hammered together, neither yielding. Then the world tore open. A blast beyond words blossomed, an expanding storm of energy that consumed the entire Infinite Soul Hall.
The array Sheldon Soulsby and his demonic cohorts had hurriedly patched together burst apart like soggy papyrus beneath a cyclone. Flooring forged from ghost-lit iron buckled upward. Half the blood from the pool flashed into steam, and wide black fissures tore through the very air, refusing to close.
Amid the roiling haze, Jared pinwheeled backward over one hundred meters before he dug his boots in. His sword arm tingled with pins and needles, and turbulent blood hammered against his ribs.
Across the battlefield, Soul Devourer merely swayed once and settled again in mid-air.
The enormous claw, split a moment earlier by Jared’s blade, quivered, knitting itself together as though mending flesh, its murderous aura undiminished.
